Microbial contamination, such as gram positive bacteria, gram negative bacteria, yeast, and fungi may cause severe illness and even death in humans. When people become infected with gram negative bacteria, the bacteria may produce fever-inducing bacterial endotoxins. Endotoxins can be dangerous and even deadly to humans. Endotoxin molecules, which are lipopolysaccharide components of cell walls of gram negative bacteria, can be present in drug formulations and surfaces of medical devices, independent of microbial contamination. Endotoxin contamination can happen even if a system passes a sterility test, which is why an independent endotoxin test is required.
Currently, a variety of tests have been developed to detect the presence of endotoxin in or on the sample being tested using hemocyte lysates from horseshoe crabs. Clotting will occur when the hemocyte lysate is exposed to the endotoxin. Hemocyte lysate is amebocyte lysate produced from the hemolymph of various horseshoe crab species, including the Limulus, Tachypleus, and Carcinoscorpius species. A commonly used amebocyte lysate is produced from the hemolymph of Limulus, or Tachypleus species, is referred to as Limulus amebocyte lysate (“LAL”). Routine tests that use LAL as a test reagent include gel clot assays, end point turbidimetric assays, kinetic turbidimetric assays, endpoint chromogenic assays, and kinetic chromogenic assays. Tests that use LAL reagent may also be used to test for glucans, a marker for fungal contamination.
More information on LAL assays and the standards used may be found in United States Pharmacopeia (“USP”) Chapter 85 “Bacterial Endotoxins Test” (“BET”), Japanese Pharmacopeia 4.01 “Bacterial Endotoxin Test”, European Pharmacopoeia 2.6.14 “Bacterial Endotoxins”, and other equivalent national Pharmacopeias. Many of the Pharmacopeias listed above have been harmonized. Additional internationally harmonized pharmacopeia information can be found in ICH Q4B Annex 14 “Bacterial Endotoxin Test General Chapter”. For endotoxin testing in medical devices, information can be found in USP Chapter 161 “Transfusion and Infusion Assemblies and Similar Medical Devices” and ANSI/AAMI ST72 “Bacterial endotoxins—Test methods, routine monitoring, and alternatives to batch testing”. These standards and procedures may be generally referred to as compendia.
Manufacturers in the pharmaceutical, medical device, and food industries must meet certain standards to make sure their products do not contain microbial or endotoxin contamination. These industries require frequent, accurate, and sensitive testing for the existence of endotoxins to meet various safety standards, such as those set by the United States Food and Drug Administration, or the Environmental Protection Agency. These agencies accept many of the compendia procedures standards. Thus, if manufacturers want to obtain government approval to release a new product to market, many of the FDA requirements may be met if the products comply with the methods and standards in the compendia listed above. This can substantially reduce the cost to manufacturers to obtain FDA approval of new products.
These assays in the various compendia require aqueous solutions comprising known concentrations of an endotoxin for use as “standards”. These aqueous solutions are typically unstable; therefore they are usually made from powdered toxins at the test location just prior to testing. The LAL reagent also usually comes in powder form and must be reconstituted in an aqueous solution before use.
Typically, only a few milligrams of the endotoxin and LAL powders are required, therefore accurate measurement of these powders may be tedious. Due to their fine particle size, these powders often stick to container and spatula surfaces, and are difficult to confine in the containers during testing procedures, posing additional handling problems. Using the conventional test methods, a skilled operator must manually reconstitute the endotoxin and LAL powders into endotoxin-free water while not contaminating the reagent solutions with laboratory equipment or through environmental contact.
Preparation of the endotoxin and LAL powders is difficult due to the slow solvation of the critical biological molecules and their propensity to stick to surfaces during mixing and condense on surfaces afterwards. The LAL reagent also starts reacting slowly upon reconstitution and has a very short shelf life. While the best practice would be to mix these immediately before use, workflow typically dictates mixing them at the start of the process. Also, the process of preparation is prone to contamination from endotoxins which are ubiquitous in the environment.
The agencies also require a series of calibration tests to ensure the equipment and reagents used are functioning properly. The calibration tests and sample measurements must also be made more than once. The current laboratory method of complying with BET and other compendia is very detailed and requires repetitive and highly precise measuring of fluid volumes for distribution into multiple inlets of a microplate or the like without contamination.
The most common method of performing an LAL analysis is with a microwell plate and reader. A matrix of reaction wells, open at the top and with a clear window on the bottom, are placed in a heated spectrophotometric reader used for multiple, simultaneous assays. There are many drawbacks, including the lengthy time it takes to prepare the plate, its high cost, the opportunity for mistakes and contamination, and the need to have the work done by a technician specifically trained for and dedicated to this task.
Highly skilled operators are continuously monitored to ensure proper technique and accuracy of measurement and testing, and the operators are retrained as needed so as to ensure accuracy of the repetitive actions. Typical methods may have as many as 248 slow and time consuming pipetting steps, making it an error prone method due to its complexity and contamination prone due to its length and number of manipulations.
Methods and devices have been developed to reduce the amount of steps or automated some or all of the steps in endotoxin testing. Some methods include automating one or more pipetting or aliquoting steps, automated mixing of samples, or preloading reagents in test substrates that allow only a very limited number of tests.
Other automated methods rely on robotics to measure and distribute samples and reagents in a microplate. Once prepared, the plate is loaded in a reader, either manually or using another robot. The robot is typically a pipette-based dispensing system which accurately transfers samples and reagents from a vial rack to the plate, replacing pipette tips to prevent cross-contamination. This is an expensive system which needs frequent validation of its robotic operations and may use multiple disposable, pipettes, tips, multiwell plates, dilution tubes, pipette filling trays, sampling vials, etc. for each run. It also prepares the wells in sequence, and like manual preparation, cannot start all the reactions simultaneously. Contamination is still an issue and since the process is typically unmonitored, there is no legitimate way of rejecting contaminated samples for cause.
All of the developed methods or devices, however, are missing one or more of the following aspects, low cost automation designed into the substrate, disposable clean substrate to insure cleanliness, compendial testing compliance on each substrate, built in individual test measurement validation, and simplicity of measurement operation. Accordingly, there exists a need for a more semi-automated testing method or procedure for testing and analyzing the endotoxin concentration in a fluid sample which reduces or eliminates the amount of potential operator error that complies with compendia.